Shinzen Young is a meditation teacher who applies mindfulness to pain relief. His article is excellent, and describes suffering as the product of resistance to pain.
December 27, 2006
Psych Approaches to Back Pain
That’s Fit blogs on psychological approaches to back pain like cognitive behavioral therapy, and a commenter mentions Dr. John Sarno’s approach to back pain.
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December 25, 2006
God is a concept by which we measure our pain
So says John Lennon in a song found via a link at Heartache with Hard work.
Lennon is right to connect pain and spirituality, but I don’t agree with his conclusions. Song’s not bad. I’d never heard it before.
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Pain Blog
I was looking around to see if any blogs focus on pain. I was expecting to find some personal blogs, but the few I found seemed to be promotional and business-oriented.
Here’s one by a psychiatrist that seems to have a cognitive behavioral therapy orientation.
December 24, 2006
Toxin To Modulate Chronic Pain
A toxin works on pain gates
She said sufferers of chronic pain can have the added problem of being diagnosed with no reason for the pain.
“The patient experiences severe pain because their nerve cells that are responsible for pain transmission are overactive,†she said.
“This is primarily due to abnormal activity of voltage-gated sodium channels in the nerve cells.
“Conventional drugs, such as local anaesthetics, block all types of sodium channels, causing severe side-effects.
“Our toxin only blocks a specific channel – the first time a toxin like this has been shown to work – therefore providing pain relief without severe side-effects.â€ÂÂÂ
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Wegner's Ironic Processing Theory
Try to ignore pain, and you end up obsessing. Pay attention to it, and it fades.
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Empathy a vicarious reponse to pain
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Vicarious responses to pain in anterior cingulate cortex: is empathy a multisensory issue?
School of Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor, Wales. pspc46@bangor.ac.uk
Results obtained with functional magnetic resonance imaging show that both feeling a moderately painful pinprick stimulus to the fingertips and witnessing another person’s hand undergo similar stimulation are associated with common activity in a pain-related area in the right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Common activity in response to noxious tactile and visual stimulation was restricted to the right inferior Brodmann’s area 24b. These results suggest a shared neural substrate for felt and seen pain for aversive ecological events happening to strangers and in the absence of overt symbolic cues. In contrast to ACC 24b, the primary somatosensory cortex showed significant activations in response to both noxious and innocuous tactile, but not visual, stimuli. The different response patterns in the two areas are consistent with the ACC’s role in coding the motivational-affective dimension of pain, which is associated with the preparation of behavioral responses to aversive events.
Only this abstract is available
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December 23, 2006
Pain Is Mediated By Cognitive Factors
Central Neural Mechanisms that Interrelate Sensory and Affective Dimensions of Pain (2002) Donald D. Price, University of Florida, Gainesville
(pdf)
Heavy going. Key points more me: Price finds that the the insular cortex and the posterior parietal complex have a role in evaluating sensory pain, estimating the threat, and stimulating the affective component in the anterior cingulate cortex. Context and memory play a role in this evaluation.
Posterior parietal cortical areas that integrate somatosensory input with other sensory modalities and with learning and memory project to the same cortical and subcortical limbic structures (ACC, IC, and amygdala) that receive direct input from spinal pain pathways (2, 32, 47, 48). Convergence at the level of ACC would be consistent with a mechanism in which somatic
perceptual and cognitive features of pain would be integrated with
attentional and rudimentary emotion mechanisms.
But the prefrontal cortex is involved too, in a feedback loop.
Pain unpleasantness endured over time engages prefrontal cortical areas involved in reflection and rumination over the future implications of a persistent pain condition. The ACC may serve this function by coordinating somatosensory features of pain with prefrontal cerebral mechanisms involved in attaching significance and long term implications to pain, a function associated with secondary-pain affect.
Price sees this secondary-pain affect as distinct from the immediate sense of unpleasantness. But he doesn’t say where it takes place. I’m inclined to think it’s looping back to the ACC
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